Anthony Bourdain & the future of food writing

Instead of riffing on a lavish, career-hobbling multi-drug habit, Bourdain’s main dilemma now is whether or not he should endorse a rubbish restaurant in return for $40,000 a month. (In the end he decides not to, but not before torturing himself – and us – with the fact that the only thing stopping him is a narcissistic desire to believe himself “above all that”). Medium Raw is not so much written in a minor key – it is as ferociously rude as anything Bourdain has done before – as written at one remove from the thing that made him who and what he is. As Bourdain admits, by letting the world in on his love affair with cooking, he managed to kill the thing he loved the most.